Behind grass-finished beef’s sizzle, there’s steak — and more. Locavores love it as a more healthful and humane alternative to the grain-finished commodity beef in most supermarkets, and it gets a big thumbs-up on the popular Paleo Diet.

“For my own personal consumption, grass-fed beef is all I buy,” says Ed Lowe, owner of Celebration Restaurant in Dallas. “My understanding is that cows were meant to eat grass, not corn. It’s a more natural way to raise beef. … It tastes fresher and tastes better to me.”

Cooking grass-finished beef, which is inherently leaner, can be tricky. Steaks need quick, high heat; other cuts crave low and slow. The same guidelines apply to grass-finished bison, another lean meat.

First, though, you have to figure out what you’re buying. There are no legal definitions for the terms pastured, grass-fed or grass-finished, which are used interchangeably.

“There’s been a big demand for grass-fed in the last five to seven years,” says Matt Hamilton, rancher and owner of Local Yocal Farm to Market in McKinney. “Producers didn’t want to miss an opportunity, so they’d say, ‘Oh, our cattle are grass-fed, but feedlot-finished.’ Now grass-fed is meaningless.”

So sticklers like Hamilton use grass-finished to distinguish their beef from the wannabes.

No matter what you call it, the buzz is about cattle that spend their whole lives on pasture, sometimes supplemented by cut forage, such as hay. Further, the animals are typically raised without hormones, antibiotics or growth enhancers. It’s what Paleo enthusiasts call clean beef.

Many producers sell at farmers markets, where it’s an old-fashioned, handshake kind of business. They often welcome visitors to their ranches, and many farmers markets send envoys to vet their vendors.

Those aren’t the only places to find local, grass-finished beef. Hamilton, who raises his Genesis Beef on family land in Oklahoma, sells out of Local Yocal, which is a butcher shop and local specialty foods store. Burgundy Pasture Beef sells out of its Grandview boucherie, or butcher’s shop, and makes home and restaurant delivery runs to Dallas and Fort Worth. Whole Foods Market carries fresh grass-finished beef, and some natural foods stores carry frozen.

Because local production remains small, especially after the dry 2011, few restaurants can offer grass-finished exclusively. It’s also pricey compared with commodity beef.

Celebration features ground Burgundy Pasture beef in several specials, including chopped steak, stuffed poblano peppers (Hatch chiles in season) and beef taco salad. When the restaurant is lucky enough to score some steaks, they go as specials, too. Lower Greenville newbie HG Sply Co., with its Paleo-inspired menu, buys from Local Yocal, among others.

Company Cafe and Urbano Cafe deal with the limited local supply by importing grass-finished steaks from a part of the world steeped in grass-fed culture: Uruguay in South America.

“We run it as a special,” says Urbano Cafe owner Mitch Kauffman. “The feedback we get is: People either love it or they don’t. Some people think it tastes gamy. … Personally, I love it.”

There is one area restaurant that sells grass-finished exclusively: The Potager (pah-tah-JAY), a quirky, pay-what-you-think-is-fair outfit in Arlington. Instead of steaks, chef-owner Cynthia Chippindale works with the cheaper, more plentiful cuts, such as rump and chuck roasts and shanks.

“We’ll start with a pot roast one day, with all those beautiful juices,” she says. The second day, “I’m going to turn it into a stew, with potatoes, carrots, celery, turnips, mushrooms. If there’s still meat left over, we take the juices remaining, reduce them down and make a beef pot pie. For $25, I can feed a family of four for three complete meals.

“These cuts have a lot of connective tissue that only softens and then melts into deliciousness after a long, slow braise,” she says. And Chippindale does mean s-l-o-w: “At the restaurant, we set the oven at 200 F, pop the roast in before we leave around 9:30 and let it go all night until 9 the next morning. It always comes out perfect.”

If that doesn’t sound safe, consider that the U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends cooking beef to an internal temperature of 145 F, and 200 F far exceeds that.

Prized steak cuts, on the other hand, need to cook quickly over high heat. As Hamilton likes to say in his Steak 101 class: “There’s rare, medium-rare and ruined.”

He uses a hot charcoal fire — no briquettes, please — and caramelizes the outside of the steak, seasoning only with salt and pepper. Sometimes he adds one more step to enhance tenderness, especially for some of the chewier cuts such as sirloin: slice it thin, across the grain. “Let your knife do the work,” he says.

What if you have only a gas grill? “You’re not going to get the heat you get with a charcoal grill,” he says. Then he deadpans: “The best way to use your gas grill is to sell it on Craigslist to make money to buy a charcoal grill.”

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